Looks Like They Picked the Wrong Dr. Seuss Books to Ban

They shoulda come for this one:

Instead they went after And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, et al. Was anyone ever inspired to murder by If I Ran the Zoo?

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Twitter's embed is clipping a lot of the quote. Sorry. The quote is also rife among Amazon products, example at your right.

And, indeed Luigi Mangione seemed to Care a whole awful lot. With emphasis on the awful.

But I had a more pressing question, and fortunately a little Googling brought me to the answer at Barstool Sports:

I have spent the last hour scouring twitter and google for info to make sure there is no relation between Luigi and THE LEGENDARY Chuck Mangione. One of the greatest trumpet players of all time and heir to the title of "greatest trumpet solo of all time". This will be too soul-crushing for us.

Video at the link. Recommended.

But the murder has caused some serious chin-pulling commentary about American health care policy. Kevin D. Williamson has his finger on a big part of the problem: No Mandate, But Still a Mess.

Reactions to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson have ranged from the insipid to the illiterate to the despicable. The neurotic need to imbue health insurance—an ordinary financial services product—with some kind of grand moral significance is, of course, part of the problem: If you treat a financial tool as a matter of good and evil—and if the most powerful people in the country insist that the evil predominates—then you should not be surprised when people start to take the idea seriously and act accordingly.

A little bit of understanding would do a great deal to lower the emotional temperature of the health insurance discussion. But, of course, Washington is packed to the rafters with people who are rich and powerful only because they have a gift for raising the emotional temperature of a situation. Witness the unseemly spectacle of Sen. Ted Cruz, who sleeps at night on a mattress stuffed with Goldman Sachs money, getting woke with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about evil corporations desiring to “poison” our children’s food. Nobody wants to calm down, which is one way you know that everybody needs to calm down.

A literate, non-insipid take is available from Allysia Finley at the WSJ: UnitedHealthcare and the ObamaCare Con.

Well, well. Progressives are at last acknowledging that ObamaCare is a failure. They aren’t doing so explicitly, of course, but their social-media screeds against insurers, triggered by last week’s murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, suggest as much. “We’ve gotten to a point where healthcare is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations,” CBS News medical contributor Céline Gounder said during a Friday segment on the roasting of health insurers.

A Gallup survey released Friday affirms the sentiment, finding that only 44% of Americans rate U.S. healthcare good or excellent, down from 62% when Democrats passed ObamaCare in 2010. A mere 28% rate the country’s insurance coverage highly, an 11-point decline. ObamaCare may rank as the biggest political bait-and-switch in history.

Remember Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan and doctor, you could keep them? Sorry. How about his claim that people with pre-existing conditions would be protected? Also not true. The biggest howler, however, was that healthcare would become more affordable.

Unfortunate reality: everyone knows that Obamacare was sold via lies. But Americans have spoken: we don't care.

But surely insurance companies are the main villain of the US health system, right? Well, bunkie, Noah Smith has to disagree with that: Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system. It is a very reality-based analysis, highly recommended, and let's just skip way down to the ugly truth:

The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves. The smiling doctor who writes you prescriptions and sends you to the MRI and refers you to a specialist without ever asking you for money knows full well that you’re going to end up having to wrangle with the insurance company for the cost of all those services. The gentle nurse who sets up your IV doesn’t tell you whether each dose of drugs through the IV could set you back hundreds of dollars, but they know. When the polite administrative assistants at the front desk send you back to treatment without telling you that their services are out of your network, it’s because they didn’t bother to check. The executives making millions at “nonprofit” hospitals, and the shareholders making billions on the profits of companies that supply and contract with those hospitals, are people you never see and probably don’t even think about.

Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.

Sermon: We would be far better off if health care was viewed as (simply) another part of the capitalist economic system, where goods and services are primarily provided via the market. Which has, you may have noticed, done a pretty good job of providing affordable products to the vast majority of customers. Based on what those customers want, not what government thinks they should have.

Also of note:

  • Persecuting the successful. Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the imminent non-fictional remake of Atlas Shrugged: Incoming Trump administration is coming for big tech companies.

    President Joe Biden's administration has been horrible for tech companies. The incoming Trump administration may be just as bad.

    That's disappointing, if not really surprising. During Donald Trump's first presidential term, he frequently railed against big tech companies via his social media accounts, called for European-style regulation of tech businesses, and set out to ban TikTok, while the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Facebook. And incoming vice president J.D. Vance hasn't just been critical of major tech companies; he has praised current FTC head Lina Khan, who has aggressively pursued those companies using an expansionist concept of antitrust law.

    Elon, could you talk to Donald about this?

  • [Amazon Link]
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    Also on the "things could be worse, and probably will be" beat… Jacob Sullum takes another hard look at the prospective FBI Director: Trump will defer to ‘very fair’ Kash Patel in deciding whether to investigate opponents.

    Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that various people who have crossed him, including state and federal prosecutors, members of Congress, and President Joe Biden, should be investigated, prosecuted, and jailed. But in a Meet the Press interview on Sunday, the president-elect said he would not direct his subordinates to follow through on those threats after he takes office on January 20. Trump told the show's host, Kristen Welker, he would instead leave those decisions to his appointees at the FBI and the Justice Department.

    That commitment is not exactly reassuring, since Trump's pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, has repeatedly threatened to "come after" Trump's political opponents, including journalists as well as current and former government officials. Patel published an enemies list as an appendix to his 2023 book Government Gangsters, which alleges a "Deep State" conspiracy against Trump that Patel equates with a conspiracy to subvert democracy and the Constitution. The list, which includes 60 names, is limited to people who have served in the executive branch. Patel notes that it does not include "other corrupt actors of the highest order," such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.), and "the entire fake news mafia press corps."

    Jacob also has some literary analysis of Patel's children's classic The Plot Against the King (Amazon link at your right) which includes the key character "a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer."

    This is why my writing career never got far off the ground: I never had the inspiration to name one of my characters "Paul the Notable Nerd".

  • Another warm and fuzzy department to kill. Veronique de Rugy takes part in Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue: Abolish the Small Business Administration.

    Everyone loves small businesses. But that's no reason to keep an agency dedicated to extending loans and other privileges to some of them at the expense of everyone else.

    Contrary to common belief, it is not the role of government to subsidize private companies. This statement is true whether the company is green, minority-owned, small, or gargantuan. Besides, the fetish for small businesses is annoying. Small businesses employ 45.9 percent of American workers, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). That sounds impressive until you realize that 99.9 percent of businesses in America are small. That means 0.1 percent of businesses in the country employ more than half of the work force.

    Only one thing left to abolish! Coming up tomorrow!

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Last Modified 2024-12-11 5:14 AM EST